In line with the presidential theme of the multilingual U.S., I propose this special session on the intersection of contemporary migration and coming-of-age narratives that center the difficult process of growing up while culturally hybrid, constantly negotiating languages and traditions with expectations to assimilate into the host society of the U.S. The coming-of-age genre is ideal for the exploration of what it means to belong in U.S. sociopolitical settings because novels in the genre show how young protagonists ponder the adults and citizens they ought to become. Yet how are young characters supposed to embody idyllic forms of adulthood if they cannot become full citizens because of their legal status, or if language barriers prevent them from participating fulsomely in public milieus?

This panel session aims to answer these difficult questions as the panelists analyze diasporic characters in processes of self-forging in which they encounter contradictory expectations from their families and communities, and society at large. These mixed expectations confuse the characters as they are unable to discern one single ideal way to be an adult and citizen in a society that marginalizes their intersecting identities of class, gender, race, nationality, and sexuality. The panelists evaluate how cultural practices signify the effects of migration on several narrators and how different cultural, linguistic, and ethnic elements, affect narrators’ comings-of-age in U.S. settings.

Moreover, the session proposes a multi-diasporic approach that will enable fruitful conversation exploring how new scholarship can study the interactions of multiple diasporas that often share urban enclaves where multilinguistic interactions are mundane experiences. The panelists will discuss representations of multicultural and multilinguistic formative processes in the context of the Vietnamese, Jordanian, and Colombian diasporas. The panelists thus explore the incidence of Vietnamese, Arabic, and Spanish languages.

This panel session expands the already-growing scholarship on contemporary Bildungsromane in the context of global migratory movements, which includes such recent titles as Ricardo Quintana-Vallejo. Children of Globalization: Diasporic Coming-of-age Novels in Germany, England, and the United States (Routledge, 2021), Kate Rose. Displaced Literature of Indigeneity, Migration, and Trauma (Routledge, 2020), and numerous titles from Routledge’s book series Studies in Migration and Diaspora, to name a few.

Each of the three panelists will have a 15-to-18-minute presentation, which will enable a 15-minute discussion with audience participation. The first panelist, Professor Lan Dong, will examine how Thanhha Lai’s verse novel Inside Out & Back Again maps the narrator Kim Hà’s migration from Vietnam to the United States and complicates the reader’s understanding of the narrator’s bilingual and bicultural heritage using Donna Gabaccia’s theory on the intersection between ethnic food and ethnic American identity as a point of entry. The second panelist, Julieta Flores Jurado, studies Diana Abu-Jaber’s memoir The Language of Baklava as a coming-of-age narrative that harnesses the symbolic power of food to chronicle her own life and to narrate the story of her extended family’s move from Jordan to the United States, and in particular her father’s relation to food and to an elusive home. Finally, Mai Hunt studies Ingrid Rojas Contreras’s The Fruit of the Drunken Tree, a coming-of-age novel which offers a metafictional account of Rojas’s own exile and experience as an immigrant in the US (complicated by her decision to write the novel in English). Hunt’s study emphasizes how questions of diaspora, linguistic assimilation and refuge are essential to discussing the Colombian armed conflict, which is often limited to a national purview.

By offering this multi-diasporic and multilinguistic approach, this panel session aims to provide attendants with current and novel approaches to the coming-of-age genre as it intersects with contemporary diasporas in U.S. settings. The panelists combine innovative approaches including food studies (and cultural studies), identities-in-flux, studies of violence, racism, and intersecting forms of oppression all while pondering the difficulties of growing up a migrant.